August 2004

08/30/2004

There has been a lot of cynical speculation about the decision of the notoriously GOP-supporting Clear Channel to convert KKZN, apparently now KTLK AM 760 from an all sports talk format to being an Air America affiliate. They're trying to pre-empt KGNU's entry into the Denver market, they want it to fail, or whatever. I mostly take the decision at face value as being in their economic best interest. 760 was getting destroyed as a sports talk station by the ESPN radio affiliate and 950 The Fan. (Yes, until today we had three all-sports stations, not to mention 850 KOA that carries Rockies baseball and Buffs football.) They have to know Air America will do well in this area. The fact that Air America provides packaged programming for the entire country, without local expenses, makes it a low risk deal from a pure business perspective. And maybe there is a little hedging of bets going on -- Clear Channel likely realizes there is a realistic chance Kerry will win the election, and they want to do whatever they can to avoid hostile scrutiny by the FCC and for possible antitrust violations.

But there is one way Clear Channel is trying to marginalize their own Air America affiliate -- by relabeling 760 as "Boulder's Progressive Talk." If you check out the cached page from the old 760 website, you will see that 760 The Zone wasn't labeled as a Boulder station. And I can say as a Denver driver that we just don't get Boulder AM stations in most of the city -- AM radio signals have a hard time getting over the ridge that separates Boulder from the (rest of the) metro area. In fact, that's why KGNU has been reportedly looking to acquire a Denver station. I suspect that 760 is just another Lookout Mountain based radio station, in other words, a Denver radio station, which is being labeled by Clear Channel as a "Boulder" station in order to send the message to non-liberal true believers that the Air America message isn't a mainstream message -- it's just something for those weird Boulder pet guardians. Note that Air America itself calls AM 760 a Denver station.

So this is how Clear Channel can make the Air America money without too much compromise of their conservative principles.

Well, I guess I can stop feeling that people of my particular ethnic origin are unrepresented in mainstream media, because Marvel Comics just came out with their first half-Mexican, half-Puerto Rican superhero.

08/26/2004

Ken Salazar shouldn't call on Denver TV stations not to run the misleading ad from a Republican 527 attacking Salazar from the left on environmental issues. Even though there is precedent for the local stations to reject distasteful ads, at the end the stations are about making money. Besides, the idea that people should vote for Coors over Salazar on the environment is a joke, as anyone who has paid attention to Coors Brewing's environmental record knows. (Of course, the idea of the ad is to keep environmentalist voters home in November, not to convince them to vote for Coors.)

It is enough that both major Denver newspapers have denounced the ad -- which tries to blame Salazar's leadership of the state Department of Natural Resources in the '90s for a toxic spill that happened during the '80s and attacks the record settlement Salazar extracted as Attorney General as not big enough -- as false and misleading. (Update: Also denouncing are the GJ Sentinel and the Durango Herald, as reported on Ken Salazar's blog.) Salazar should just sit back and wait for pro-environmental groups like the Sierra Club to start putting the spotlight on Coors' environmental record.

Yet, Latinos and African-Americans get lumped into wide categories and hence are referred to as "the Latino vote" or "the black vote."

Cindy suggests that people start breaking down voters of color into groups like "telenovela solteras," which she describes as "20-something, bilingual Latinas who are single, hooked on Spanish soap operas and care about job growth, education and women's reproductive rights." That may sound unlikely now, but a real understanding of diversity would encompass understanding that at the same time people of color are not monolithic but also do have our own distinct world views that aren't captured by the usual political stereotypes -- which themselves are often stereotypes of "typical" white people generated by an out of touch Beltway elite.

08/24/2004

I've been ignoring the so-called Swift Boat controversy, even though there is now an irresistible local angle with the veteran who emerged from anonymity in Telluride to support John Kerry. Basically, I never signed up to be the Kerry rapid response team, and I agree with Liberal Oasis that Kerry has handled this about as well as he could and this whole "issue" will likely be ancient history by the first of September.

But I do find something pretty ironic about the Bush people's resort to arguments about what the candidates did during the Vietnam War as part of the campaign -- and not just because Bush avoided combat by using connections to get into the Texas Air National Guard, where he evidently did not fulfill his service obligations. It's that this debate about Vietnam seems like a proxy for a real debate about Iraq. The next wave of attacks on Kerry are going to focus on his role as an advocate against the war after he returned from Vietnam, and those attacks are going to go directly to what may be the most fundamental argument Bush's people are making in favor of his "re"election: That it is unpatriotic to criticize a sitting president during wartime, much less change presidents during a war.

Using Vietnam as the template for this debate, however, also highlights the increasingly disturbing parallels between the two situations. If the debate shifts to what is an appropriate way to advocate for change in the context of an unwinnable war where the leaders have no plan for success, I don't see how Bush can come out ahead. So while I am sure this attack has been planned for months, at this point in the campaign it looks like a pretty desperate move.

08/22/2004

Matthew Yglesias mentions something that I've thought about a lot lately -- the fact that the Chinese government is one of the largest financiers of the US debt through its purchases of Treasury bonds. As Matt notes, Chinese investment in American government debt seems to be "justified more on geopolitical terms than by conventional investment criteria."

Seems like most people assume that the People's Republic of China is basically a capitalist country these days, and obviously there is a lot of truth to that. But the official ideology is still Communist, and I would bet that if it were a Democratic administration that had embarked on a course of permanent expanding deficits we would be hearing a lot more about the fact that the government is handing over a lot of power over the country's economic future to a Red government. Of course, a Democratic administration wouldn't be running these kinds of deficits -- no matter how liberal John Kerry wants to be, I expect no break from Clintonism in the Democratic Party for the foreseeable future, if only because someone will have to deal with the structural deficit the Bush administration has given us.

I think the Democrats should be talking a lot more about the problem of the mushrooming deficit -- seems like there was that one great MoveOn.org ad, and that was it. I think lots of ordinary people are pretty worried about passing debt along to the next generation, and if more people realized the significant role of the Chinese government in financing the debt, they would be even more concerned about it.

I am sure the US men's basketball team's second loss of the Olympic tournament, this time to Lithuania, will set off yet another round of criticism of the members of the team. I realize it's to be expected. The American attitude about basketball is pretty much like Brazil's attitude about soccer, which is basically that the national team cannot be beaten, it can only beat itself. (I've heard that after Brazil's loss to France in the finals of the 1998 World Cup many people in Brazil claimed the team must have thrown the match.) But I think criticizing the players who made the trip to Athens misses the point -- these are the guys who answered the call, while a lot of other, frankly better, American players stayed home.

Frankly, I think there is a one word solution to the USA team's problems: Shaquille. Zone defense is totally legal in international ball, as is knocking the ball out of the cylinder, so just plant Shaq in the middle of the lane and see who dares come anywhere near there. And of course it is painfully obvious that the USA men lack a pure three point shooter. It probably would have been a good idea to pick someone like Voshon Lenard, who certainly would not come to mind as one of the twelve best players in the country but who could have been the three point specialist.

The one thing I think the team can legitimately be criticized for is their horrible free throw shooting, which really could have made the difference in the Lithuania game (which I watched on DVR). Free throw shooting seems to be turning into a lost art in this country (and I know Shaq on the team would only make the problem worse), and I don't have any good suggestions as to how to improve in that area.

08/21/2004

Vodka is for commies! OK, there is a certain Colorado blogger that I don't link to who would probably take serious exception to that comment. But how else to explain the decline of vodka drinking -- and more importantly from the point of view of a Saturday beer blogging post -- the rise of beer as the drink of choice in Russia over the past few years?

Today in Russia more people say beer is their drink of choice (47%) than vodka (33%). But 70% of the alcohol consumed is vodka and only 19% beer. I have to guess the vodka drinkers are carrying far more than their fair share of the load.

Reader Scott turned me on to this new Rasmussen Poll, released yesterday, that shows Bush and Kerry tied in Colorado at 47% apiece. This is the same result Survey USA came up with a few days ago. This poll is a little more meaningful than the SUSA poll because we can compare it to an April poll taken by Rasmussen that showed Bush leading 49-44. The poll of 500 likely voters was taken by telephone on Thursday August 19 and has a 4.5% margin of error. I think this poll removes a lot of the doubt as to whether SUSA's 47/47 poll a few days ago was merely an outlier, but we are still suffering from the poll shortage that arose from people's incorrect assumption that Colorado was a safe Bush state.

(Now where's that troll who claimed he's seen tons of polls that show Bush with a 20 point lead? Funny how the conservative website Real Clear Politics, which I am forced to admit has the best compilation of state polls, doesn't show any such thing in its Colorado poll list.)

This poll also shows that the Salazar/Coors race is close, but with a little better breathing room for the Democratic candidate: 49% Salazar to 45% Coors. Both have improved their standing since the April poll, which showed Salazar beating Coors 47-41. I think the primary battle benefitted Coors by allowing him to look like a moderate by comparison to Bob Schaffer (but who wouldn't)? I think this result shows there is no reason to panic in the Salazar camp -- they never pretended this fight was going to be an easy one.

08/18/2004

Light blogging is ahead for a few days as a combination of work pressures and family responsibilities are keeping me away from fun on the Internet. (OK, I also watched some USA/Spain Olympic women's basketball instead of blogging early this morning.)

In the meantime, check this out and remember -- our current state Secretary of State was named to that position after the untimely death of her predecessor, who was found to have stored several boxes of "missing" medical marijuana petition signatures in her office. After that and the Florida fiasco, there is not a lot of reason to trust the GOP state secretaries of state, is there? We could sure use a good solid candidate for Secretary of State in 2006 -- one with a solid base of support in the party and unquestionable integrity -- someone like Mike Miles, perhaps? Just a thought.